The President Lewis describes is the candidate I thought I saw four years ago: he’s relentlessly *sane*.
I’m very late to this party, but Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice paused in his devastating Fisking of David Brooks’s latest to point me to Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair profile of Obama in office. It doesn’t come across as if Lewis intended puffery, but it might be document I’d most like an undecided or wavering voter to read between now and Election Day.
The President Lewis describes is the candidate I thought I saw four years ago: someone relentlessly sane.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
Sane, yes. I’ll see you, and raise with “adult.” As in, able and willing to extend the limitless patience necessary for dealing with seriously disordered and emotionally ‘delayed’ children, happenstance in grown up bodies. Not just our quiveringly righteous congresscritters either, but a polity deformed by multiple cultural teratogens, foremost being the entitlements accompanying empire. Obama is an adult, and his ongoing learning curve proves this beyond a doubt to those who know an adult when they see one.